I fell off my bike yesterday (it skidded from under me when I braked and changed direction on a wet and slippery road) and inflicted a fair amount of damage on my knee, thigh and elbow. Things were made more complicated than necessary when I staged a spectacular faint in the waiting-room of a local Minor Injuries Unit and as a result was despatched in an ambulance and an oxygen mask to the nearest general hospital where an alarmingly young doctor panicked that I might have had a heart attack and was terrified that if he sent me home and I promptly had another, he would be blamed. Exhaustive tests of every conceivable kind produced absolutely no sign of heart attack, and it eventually became the accepted wisdom that I had had a common-or-garden faint, probably due to a sudden loss of blood pressure caused by the draining of large amounts of blood into the gigantic swellings on my leg. So after many hours in the Minor Injuries Unit, the ambulance and the hospital, I was eventually released and allowed to go home, long-suffering wife at the wheel.
So I'm now semi-laid up, discommoded by inability to bend my left leg more than about five degrees because of the swelling, so having to spend most of the time lying down, with or without frozen peas balanced on the offending limb. I'm on a diet of pain-killers and no alcohol (alcohol apparently dilates the veins and arteries and thus reduces blood pressure) and can't do much apart from watching the enormous platitude-fest at the Labour Party conference on television (which at least helps to keep the blood pressure up), with the left leg more or less out of action until the swellings consent to go down. Apart from that, I'm perfectly OK. Messages of sympathy would definitely be disproportionate, to use the current fad word. I'm not ill, just uncomfortable. Nothing is broken — not even the bike.
I can just about use the laptop balanced on my, er, lap, in bed (hence this), but it's not terribly comfortable and I shan't, probably, write any more until I have two legs back, so I beg your pardon for not blogging for a while about the Great Blair Speech at Conference (parts of which I found pretty emetic), "Dr" John Reid's inexplicable triumph in the Newsnight focus group, the Ryder Cup (watching golf on television compares reasonably favourably with watching washing-up dry, but not much else, however gratifying to see the Europeans trouncing the Americans), sundry murders by rottweilers and others, the private life of Gordon Brown, what kind of welcome we should give to hundreds of thousands of Bulgarian and Romanian workers who'll allegedly be flooding in once their country joins the club (few commentators seem to realise that there are an awful lot more Poles than there are Bulgarians or Romanians), or possible explanations for the weird obsession of most of the electronic and print media with an uninteresting remark that Cherie Blair probably didn't make but which would still be uninteresting even if she did. And now I must strap the frozen peas to my balloon-like thigh again.
It's all a lot of fuss about nothing, really. Bloody nuisance, though.
Brian
"Rachel from North London", survivor of the 7/7 London bombings, fabulous blogger, natural writer, has won yet more spurs with some splendid verses on the New Labour over-reaction to the terrorist threat and the government's relentless assault on our civil liberties. The last line of each verse ("The Rules of the Game Have Changed") is of course an ironical reference to that ill-judged and notorious remark by Tony Blair –
What I'm trying to do here is, and this will be followed up with the action in the next few weeks as I think you will see, is to send a clear signal out that the rules of the game have changed.
Few people are better qualified than Rachel, who has herself had the wrenching personal experience of terrorist violence at first hand, to make these comments with their biting irony, made infinitely more effective by being couched in almost flawless verse (flawless but for just two very slightly dodgy rhymes). And that's not all (as the television commercials say): the verses are packed with dozens of highly relevant hyperlinks to original texts and reports, making the whole thing not just a wonderful read (even better declaimed aloud), but also a mini-compendium of quotations in support of the indictment. It's lovely stuff, and should be chanted by Conference delegates in Manchester this week before and after The Leader's speech. Don't miss it:
http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com/2006/09/rules-of-game-have-changed.html
Hat-tip: Tim Worstall's weekly Britblog Roundup #84 (of course), issued today.
Brian
Thanks to Councillor Bob Piper of Sandwell Labour Party (who he?) for providing a link, in his blog, to a wonderful clip of the Red Army choir doing a rousing performance of Kalinka, quintessentially Russian song. Click –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_A7Hu0uKNw&eurl=
and remember to clap (off-beat only), if you can keep up….
Hat-tip: Tim Worstall (who else?), his blog.
Up-date and correction: A friend has pointed out that whoever is performing Kalinka in this clip, it ain't the Red Army choir. In fact it looks as if it's the Militia choir, judging by the uniforms. What the "dancers" are wearing on their heads is to me a mystery.
Further update and another correction, 28 September 06: The same friend has now helpfully drawn my attention to the relevant Wikipedia entry according to which:
The Leningrad Cowboys are a Finnish rock and roll band, famous for its humorous songs and concerts featuring the Soviet Red Army Choir.
Oh, well. Whoever they are, they provide a rousing version of Kalinka!
????? (with thanks to Tim for also correcting my faulty Cyrillic: see Comments)
Peter Hain's article in last Sunday's Observer must, I hope and assume, be read as a sort of manifesto, given that Hain is obviously and justifiably ambitious for further advancement in the Labour Party and the government. His declared candidature for Deputy Leader whenever that job falls vacant may surely be taken as an expression of interest, if circumstances turn out right, in the leadership itself. My own view, FWIW, is that he is probably the most substantial and attractive of the potential leadership candidates after Gordon Brown, about whose personality doubts are increasingly now being raised.
There are several interesting things about Peter Hain's article (which is worth reading in full). First, the title (assuming that this was either written or approved by Hain himself): "Being bold and progressive will win back disillusioned voters." There's a clear implication that the Blair government is not and hasn't been bold or progressive, a sentiment that many in the party would heartily agree with. Actually Blair has been bold to the point of recklessness (as Clare Short memorably pointed out while still a member of the Blair Cabinet) in his three disastrous interventionist foreign policy forays (Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan). But domestically he has either been timorous (house of lords reform, tackling the royal prerogative, pressing on with devolution and decentralisation, reinvigorating parliament, radical prison reform) or else reactionary (the assault on fundamental civil liberties, the overreaction to terrorism, ID cards and the monster personal database, ASBOs and control orders, legislating against free speech, promoting faith schools, semi-privatisation of the NHS, the tube system, prisons, the probation service, and so on). A new Labour (but not a New Labour) government that was genuinely "bold and progressive" on all these issues would indeed be a welcome change.
Secondly, I personally salute Hain's call for electoral reform, not proportional representation but the alternative vote, which would complement nicely Hain's other calls for "democratic" reform of the house of lords (code, I assume, for a wholly or mostly elected second chamber) and "empowering" local government. Personally I would go the extra mile and actively seek popular agreement to a full-fledged federal system for Britain, but it has to be accepted that such a proposal would kill a Hain leadership campaign before it began, and in the meantime a call for greater power for local government would be a good first step. Here too in his raising all these issues there's an implied reproach for the Blair government's failures.
Third, and perhaps best, I mentally clapped and cheered this finely honed passage:
Third, while being uncompromising on security, to rebalance this with eternal vigilance on individual liberty – getting the right balance between the power of the state and the freedoms of the citizen.
Note that surely deliberate use of Blair's and Reid's catch-word 'rebalance', but employed here to call for rebalancing in the opposite direction to that constantly demanded by the prime minister and his home secretary. Here is Hain's rebuke, the clearest yet, to Blair and a sorry succession of reactionary New Labour home secretaries for having failed to keep a proper balance between security and state power on the one hand, and the citizens' freedoms on the other. We must await, with hope but without much optimism, a similar pledge, even if necessarily coded, from Gordon Brown.
Fourth, Hain skillfully exploits his impressive record of progressive measures introduced for Northern Ireland in his capacity as de facto Governor-General of Northern Ireland during the suspension of devolved power-sharing government in Belfast. Alone among Blair's potential successors, Hain has actually in effect governed a country and can reasonably claim to have scored concrete successes in doing so.
Other points in this carefully crafted article are also worth noting and treasuring: the implied criticism of New Labour's habit of sham 'consultation' with the grass-roots party membership and his promise of
a new sense of partnership where the leadership listens rather than lectures, and where we consult over new policies and not bounce our backbenchers, constituencies and trade unions
and his denunciation of Ming Campbell's
enthusiasm for the private sector in public services and new privatisations like the Post Office
– the clearest possible way of disowning exactly the same enthusiasm in Blair and New Labour, but without risking the charge of disloyalty. Here too thousands of Old Labour foot soldiers will scarce forbear to cheer — as they will applaud Hain's closing call for the need
to rediscover our passion for our values and so enable the decent, caring, moral and progressive majority in British politics not to be seduced by Cameron's trendy soft focus or feel driven into the arms of the Liberals in protest, but to come home to Labour.
"Rediscover our passion for our values"! There can be no clearer acknowledgement, without flagrant disloyalty, that the passion for Labour values has been lost. Hain has hoisted the flag of revolt against the Blair inheritance and challenged us to decide whether to salute it.
Two less encouraging points need to be made about this important but generally overlooked article. First, its reproduction in the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' blog has prompted a spate of 'comments' so unthinkingly hostile and so spitefully malignant towards Hain personally that one's bound to wonder what it is about this articulate, experienced, liberal-minded and progressive man that inspires such vicious antipathy. It's very hard to avoid the uncomfortable suspicion, substantiated by some of the more mindless assaults on him in Comment is Free, that some on the left will never 'forgive' Peter Hain for being (i) of South African origin — despite his having an excellent record of doughty opposition to apartheid, and (ii) a former Liberal. It would be a tragedy, and not only or even mainly for Hain, if he were to be robbed on such shameful grounds of the opportunity and right to be judged on his formidable merits for the top job in the party and the country, if he does decide to go for it.
The last, more trivial but still regrettable, point about Peter Hain's Observer manifesto is that no fewer than eight out of its first 22 sentences have no main verb: more than a third. It seems, alas, that at least one of the unattractive features of the Blair style, the verbless sentence, lives on in the Rt Hon Peter Hain, MP.
Brian
"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence" - Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam.
Can this gem be genuine? It's been widely quoted in the media, and is included in a more extended quotation of the lady's remarks in an article in the Canadian website "Enter Stage Right", which doesn't look as if it's made it up. On the other hand, the Pakistani Islamic Republic News Agency, avoiding quoting Ms Aslam in direct speech, says only:
Pakistan's Foreign Office on Friday deplored Pope Benedict's remarks against Islam.
Foreign Office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam in a statement regretted that a respected religious leader of his stature had made partisan remarks against Islam.
She said the pope's statement proved that he was unaware of the life of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him).
She said the pope's highly controversial and regrettable statement could fan religious disharmony.
Sadly, I can't find an authoritative source for the alleged quotation. But it has appeared all over the place, even taking pride of place in the outrageously irreverent and readable 'popbitch' newsletter. So even if the spokeswoman has been misquoted, she has now been misquoted so widely that it has become part of the received wisdom that she said it. Come on, Tasnim, deny it, and spoil our day!
Brian
In a recent post I wondered aloud just how Clare Short intended to carry out her threat, or promise, to 'campaign for a hung parliament' at the next election. A comment contributor on this agreed that it was difficult to imagine campaigning for a hung parliament, but went on to ask whether I was –
assuming that the pact would be between Lib Dem and winner because of the power balance. i.e. a game theory analysis would be that if you are the winner then you make a pact with the weakest partner who can deliver a reasonable majority? If alliances were on policy alone, then Lib Dems would surely be further from the Tories than Labour. That’s not just my opinion – but apparently also of the majority of voters [citing a Times report of recent polls].
I think we're all agreed about the logical impossibility of 'campaigning for a hung parliament'. Martin Kettle's stimulating and mostly spot-on article in today's (16.ix.06) Guardian starts, splendidly:
Clare Short's decision to stand down as an MP in order to campaign for a hung parliament lacks nothing in ambition. But one wonders how she intends to carry out a task of such fiendish complexity. Her one-woman crusade to overturn the pattern of the last eight British general elections brings to mind the Python sketch about Ron Obvious, who was set on being the first man to jump across the English Channel.
and finishes:
I started by wondering how Clare Short intends to campaign for a hung parliament. I end by wondering why.
Where I venture to question Kettle's thesis is over his expectation that the LibDems would be unable to do a deal with either Labour or the Tories in a hung parliament because of being split down the middle on which of the two would be their preferred partner, the parliamentary party being on the whole left-leaning and reluctant to contemplate a deal with the Tories, while much of the LibDem party in the country is right of centre and would view with great distaste the idea of a deal with Labour. I'm inclined to suspect that –
(a) the decision would rest with the LibDems at Westminster who could safely ignore sentiment out in the sticks if either Labour or the Tories were to offer a sufficiently attractive carrot, including a promise of PR, to justify a deal (probably an understanding on policies rather than a formal coalition, although Sir Menzies Campbell would surely love a seat in a coalition Cabinet as Foreign Secretary!);
(b) Cameron is already making such dramatic changes to the personality and outward appearances of the Conservative Party, and both Blair and Brown have so tarnished the image of Labour in LibDem eyes by their policies on Iraq and civil liberties, that it's no longer obvious that by the time of the next election even left-leaning LibDem MPs would instinctively prefer to be in bed with Labour than with the Tories; and
(c) an enormous amount will depend on which of the two big parties has the most seats in the new parliament, and in what proportions, as Kettle rightly points out.
Procedural issues might well be decisive in determining which of the Labour or Tory leaders would get into No. 10. There's a general assumption that the Queen, faced with a hung parliament, and after taking informal advice from her own principal private secretary, the secretary to the cabinet and the pre-election prime minister's principal private secretary, would probably first invite the leader of the party with the most seats in the house of commons to try to form a government. But supposing that Ming Campbell, either shortly before or immediately after the election, had privately (or even publicly) indicated to the three wise men (and hence to the Queen) that regardless of which of the bigger parties won the most seats, he would be very ready to work with (say) the Cameron Tories and sustain them in government, but that he couldn't see enough common ground with (e.g.) Gordon Brown as Labour leader to be able to work with him in a way that would permit government to be effectively conducted? If Labour then emerged as the biggest party, to which of Cameron and Brown would the Queen give the first chance of trying to form a government? Without LibDem support, Brown might be unable to form a government with the confidence of a majority in the house of commons: yet there would be outrage if Labour emerged as the biggest party yet the Queen failed to give him a shot at putting together a grouping of smaller parties capable of giving him a majority. The same things would apply if the positions were reversed, mutatis mutandis.
Moreover, whatever their preferences, the LibDems might find it very difficult to refuse their support to whichever big party leader, Cameron or (?) Brown, was given the first commission to try to form a government: to do so might appear unpatriotic and obstructive, making the LibDems responsible for a constitutional crisis that might continue for weeks or even months. If the first leader to be invited to try to form a government was also prepared to concede the crucial promise of PR (whatever he might have said before the election), that might clinch it for the LibDems.
There's yet another intriguing possibility, not considered by Martin Kettle. Assuming that Brown (or whoever else had succeeded Blair) was prime minister up to and including the election, and if Labour then emerged as the biggest party but without an overall majority, it would be open to him to defer his visit to the Palace to offer his resignation until he had conducted talks with the LibDems and other smaller party leaders to see if he could put together a partnership capable of winning a vote of confidence in the House, whereupon he would be entitled to inform the Palace that he proposed to continue in office. In principle this could give Labour a significant advantage in the hung parliament stakes. The incumbent prime minister, who will by definition be Labour, could even try to hang on without resigning in the effort to construct a majority even if the Tories had won more seats than Labour: this is after all what Ted Heath tried to do in a highly complex situation in 1974. To quote the Wikipedia account, –
Heath called an election for February 28, 1974. The result was inconclusive: the Conservative Party received a plurality of votes cast, but the Labour Party gained a plurality of seats due to the Ulster Unionist MPs refusing to support the Conservatives. Heath began coalition negotiations with leaders of the Liberal Party, but, when these failed, on March 4, 1974 he resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Harold Wilson and a minority Labour government. Wilson was eventually confirmed with a wafer-thin majority in a second election in October of the same year.
Those such as Clare Short who are attracted by the idea of a hung parliament can't, surely, have thought through all these possible permutations and their widely differing implications. Two potentially contentious conclusions may be drawn.
First, regardless of the numbers of votes cast and seats won by the various parties, including the smallest, the outcome will be unlikely to bear any relationship to 'the will of the electorate' since it will be determined by mainly subjective advice given to the Queen by unelected, unrepresentative and unaccountable officials, the Queen's equally subjective decisions on how to act, and the result of private bargaining between the various party leaders. Not a single voter, not even Clare Short, will have been able to cast his or her vote for whatever comes out of that horse-trading process, since it will all happen after the votes have been cast and counted.
Secondly, the enthusiasts for proportional representation ought to ponder the implications of introducing an electoral system that would ensure a hung parliament, and the unpredictable consequences of that, after virtually every election, not just the very rare ones produced by First Past the Post. The constitutional niceties will give wonderful scope for the pundits — Peter Hennessy, Alan Watkins, Vernon Bogdanor and the rest — but the heart sinks at the thought of being put through it all more than once in every 20 years or so.
Brian
A few examples of remarks, written or spoken, about which the author might usefully have had second thoughts, either because they reveal more about the author's attitudes than perhaps he or she intended, or because of the frontal assault on the English language that they inflict:
Reacting to the ruling from a panel of three judges, a "disappointed" Mr Reid said: "I continue to believe that those whose actions have undermined any legitimate claim to asylum should not be granted leave to remain in the UK. I therefore intend to legislate at the earliest opportunity to take new powers to deny people in this position leave to remain."
(After court ruling preventing him from deporting the Afghan hijackers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1837686,00.html
April 25 (Bloomberg) — U.K. Home Secretary Charles Clarke today defended the government's use of "control orders'' against suspected terrorists, saying they were a key safeguard against people who can't be prosecuted. "I defend it categorically,'' Clarke told the Eminent Jurists Panel at a hearing in central London. The orders give "some capacity for the state against people we don't feel able to pursue through the courts in a normal prosecution.''
Hat-tip: the Bewilderness blog, 25 April 2006
Libraries are transforming their work with readers and communities to promote reading, learning and to provide information – developing a role that embraces, but goes beyond book lending.
– Andrew Stevens, Senior policy adviser (Libraries), Museums, Libraries and Archives Council: Letter in Guardian, 13 Sept 06 http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1870889,00.html
The Guardian is guilty of religious intolerance by labelling anyone with a strongly held belief a fundamentalist… Demonic possession, spiritual healing and conservative sexual morality all appear in the Bible and are widely believed in by Christians.
… Rev Ben Phillips, Carlisle, Cumbria; Guardian, September 14, 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,,1871820,00.html
Demonic possession, spiritual healing and conservative sexual morality?
…in the early years of Revisionism its harshest critics were not gentiles (few of whom knew much about these intestine scissions), but other Zionists. – Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Guardian, Thursday September 14, 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1871882,00.html
(Perhaps a subeditor is to blame for this one? Or is it a subliminal reference to cut versus uncut?)
Ms [Hazel] Blears proposed that Labour's parliamentary candidates should be subjected to "community hustings" in front of the public… Constituency party members would be allowed to retain the right to vote for the Labour candidate, she stressed. — Guardian, Thursday September 14, 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1871870,00.html
(No-one can say that the party "Chair" is illiberal: Labour party members will be allowed to retain the right to vote Labour! just fancy!)
Two seats down, somewhat improbably, sat Cat Deeley, not a client of Zoe's, but with her flowing blonde hair and tanned limbs, looking like she could be. A true reflection of the fact that the "Rachel Zoe" look has travelled all the way from Hollywood to ITV.
— Imogen Fox, Guardian, 15 Sept 06
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1873124,00.html
(Um… say again?)
Yet for all its grotesque hyperbole, Wizard of the Crow struck me as truthful in its dissection of power, and remarkably free of bitterness. At more than 700 pages, its flaws, of obsessive reiteration and prolixity, arise partly from its bold experimentation with oral forms, and from giving rein to the pathologies of the corrupt at the expense of the more intimate dilemmas of those who challenge them. But the poisonousness of its targets never infects the author's vision, nor his faith in people's power to resist. Perhaps that in itself is a triumph.
— Maya Jaggi, reviewing Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Guardian Review, 9 Sept 06 http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1867695,00.html
(…or perhaps it isn't. First prize for the Admiring Review Most Likely to Ensure That No-one Will Buy the Book; nominated for Pseud's Corner entry of the Year)
I admire Clare Short`s refusal to cow tail and she speaks clearly,honestly and is in favour of more democracy in the UK and not less, as we still have a Govt elected with a mire 22.6% of the population,under `First Past the Post'! … She should campaign for a wide debate on the key parts of the Power Report and PR and if it leads to a `Hung Parliamnt'-that is what the People of the UK will decree! PR is more likely to lead to a greater degree of democractic fairness and less `bully-boy' politics!
— Councillor Patrick Smith, comment on Newsnight's blog post about Clare Short's call for a hung parliament and 'electoral reform'. (Fortunately, perhaps, for the author of this, there seem to be several Councillors Patrick Smith…)
Emphasis mine, throughout.
Brian
The BBC Newsnight blog has picked up an article in the Independent newspaper by Clare Short, former International Development Secretary who (eventually) resigned from the government over Iraq and her dissatisfaction with the way Tony Blair was running and continues to run his administration. The Newsnight blog invites comments on Ms Short's plan to campaign at the next general election (a trifle weirdly, you might think) for a hung parliament, i.e. a parliament in which no single party has an overall majority, a rarity under our First Past the Post electoral system but a dead cert under Proportional Representation (PR), arrogantly referred to by its deluded advocates as "electoral reform". Here's Newsnight:
Writing in Thursday’s Independent, [Clare Short] revealed that she had reached a stage where she was “profoundly ashamed of the Government” and that she believed the Labour Party had lost its way. She concluded that “the key to the change we need is a hung parliament which will bring in electoral reform”, a recommendation that has put her in the firing line of the Chief Whip. So, would a hung parliament be a good thing for democracy? Would it add a “plurality of voices and power centres in the Commons” and thus change British politics profoundly as Clare Short suggests? Is it even possible to campaign for a hung parliament?
I tried to post a comment in reply to Newsnight's questions, but it seems to have been disallowed by the Newsnight censors (unless it's going to be published with a time delay), so I'll put a lightly edited version of it here, faute de mieux [but now see postscript at [1]):
A hung parliament in our system would produce a government for which no one voter had voted — a formal or informal coalition between the LibDems and either Labour or the Tories, whichever bids the higher for the favour of the LibDems, with whichever of the big two had won more seats starting at an advantage. Either way the LibDems would be the junior partners in the government or else would have the whip hand over the party in power, able to throw it out at any moment and replace it by the other if the party in office behaved in a way not to the LibDems' liking. Ming Campbell as LibDem leader is already (I suspect) re-positioning his party in such a way as to enable it to team up with either Labour or the Tories, whichever of them offers proportional representation in exchange for the keys to No. 10. Sir Ming would, I'm sure, feel happy as Foreign Secretary in either a Cameron government, perhaps the likeliest outcome of a hung parliament, or in a Labour government under [?] Gordon Brown.
Luckily there's no way to "campaign for a hung parliament" as Clare Short is planning to do. She must be off her trolley, which is a pity after her belated but principled resignation over Iraq. She should hang on in the hope of returning to the Cabinet in a Brown government. Any post-Blair Labour government needs someone with her guts.
We had a prolonged debate in Ephems almost exactly a year ago about the demerits and alleged merits of PR, following the German elections, so those (if any) tempted to enter the lists here on the subject are politely invited to re-read the posts and numerous comments here, here and here before deciding that they have something new to say on the subject. I shall do my best to avoid going over the same ground again here by repeating what I have already said. I can foresee that some will say that PR is vindicated by the successes so far of the impressive Mrs Merkel, whose government was elected under it; those who have greater knowledge of German domestic politics than I do are welcome to argue about whether her successes are due (or down, as the young say) to PR, or in spite of it: but not here, please.
Clare Short's Indie article is worth reading for her sharp and telling indictment of the Blair government and its manifold failings (why, though, no mention of the assault on our civil liberties, almost as scandalous as the illegal aggressions in Kosovo and Iraq?). But few will be impressed by her defence of a hung parliament as the route to PR — credible only on the assumption that either Labour or the Tories, faced with a hung parliament, would buy LibDem support and entry to No. 10 by promising the LibDems PR, and then keeping the promise: a pretty unsavoury procedure for bringing about a major constitutional reform of such magnitude without the electorate having any say in the matter when the only major party advocating PR is lucky to win more than one in five of all the votes cast. But it should provide harmless entertainment at the next election to observe Ms Short trying to devise advice to individual voters to cast their votes in a way likely to result in a hung parliament. My own view, FWIW, is that a hung parliament looks at the moment a quite likely outcome of the next election, without the need for a helping hand from Clare Short, but a lot can happen between now and then to change that prospect, including conceivably a Brown premiership.
[1] Postscript: Since I wrote this, my comment has miraculously appeared on the Newsnight blog after all. So I gladly withdraw that crack about Newsnight censorship.
Brian
Martin Amis's 12,000-word essay on what he calls 'horrorism' — the phenomenon of Islamicist terrorism — in the Observer Review of 10 September 2006 should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in one of the most challenging features of all our life-times, following the collapse of Leninist communism in Europe (and, for us older fellas, of Nazi and Japanese fascism before that). Happily, the full text is available on the Web, split like Gaul into three parts, here, here and here.
This is very much a literary and cultural essay rather than a political treatise, as one might expect from a prominent novelist. It is clearly based on both prolific reading and personal
experience. Its analysis of the deep religious roots of Islamicist terrorism, especially suicide bombings, is unpleasantly persuasive. By implication it exposes the shallowness of the proposition that terrorism, especially in Britain, is in any meaningful sense 'caused' or even prompted by anger over the US-UK attack on and occupation of Iraq, although that assertion is given some limited endorsement in one particular passage. (But don't let's reopen that debate here, OK?)
One feature of Amis's essay that struck me with special force was the implied, but not explicit, difficulty of distinguishing between his account of 'Islamicism' — Muslim fundamentalism or extremism of the kind that spawns terrorism — on the one hand, and mainstream (or 'moderate') Islam, generally reputed to reject terrorism, on the other. This is a sobering and controversial thought which in real life may well do an implicit injustice to many thousands or millions of Muslims; but it may also convey a warning about the attraction that one brand of that faith must exert on the other.
Martin Amis also uses his essay to launch a powerful attack on religious faith, all religious faith, as the enemy of reason and ultimately the purveyor of death as against life. Many will be angered by some of his generalisations on this topic. It's interesting, and worrying, that some courage is obviously required to write and publish them, even in this predominantly secular society. He puts them in the context of an assault on the western cult of moral relativism which refuses to condemn almost any practice or belief, however repulsive to the western mind, if it's based on a religious faith or an alien culture, with the underlying implication that all cultures and religions are morally equal (and thus equally deserving of 'respect'), and that it represents a kind of objectionable cultural imperialism to claim superiority for any feature of western secular and reason-based culture that conflicts with that of any other. Personally I'm with Amis all the way in these linked campaigns against unreason and relativism, but others may well find them objectionable.
As a postscript, it's worth noting a recent report that –
There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism… The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution." A few months later, Cardinal Schönborn [an Austrian Cardinal], who is regarded as being close to Benedict, wrote an article for the New York Times backing moves to teach ID. He was attacked by Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory. On August 19, Fr Coyne was replaced without explanation. Vatican sources said the Pope's former astronomer, who has cancer, had asked to be replaced.
These are not purely academic debates. Leaving aside for a moment the role of religious faith in the practice of terrorism, murder and suicide, eloquently dissected by Martin Amis, there are practical, and almost wholly negative, consequences for the superimposition of religious faith on such issues as development aid and the battle against the scourge of AIDS:
[Pope] Benedict, on the second day of a visit to his native Bavaria [10 Sept 06], said that spreading the word of Jesus Christ was more important than all the emergency and development aid that rich churches like those in Germany gave to poor countries. He also stressed the role of faith in fighting AIDS "by realistically facing its deeper causes," indirectly confirming the Church view that pre-marital abstinence and fidelity in marriage are the way to combat sexually transmitted diseases.
[http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060910/wl_nm/pope_germany_dc_6]
It's a tribute to Amis's essay that he opens up such a treasure-chest — or Pandora's Box? — of vital but controversial and often neuralgic issues. Go read!
Afterthought: why does the Vatican have an observatory, and what is the Pope's astronomer looking for?
Brian
Last Friday (8 Sept 06) the Guardian ran a (perhaps deservedly) sensational front page story announcing that "For first time, doctors communicate with patient in persistent vegetative state: Brain scans showed woman was able to imagine playing tennis and walking round her flat"
The story, by Ian Sample, science correspondent, began:
A 23-year-old woman who has been in a vegetative state since suffering devastating brain damage in a traffic accident has stunned doctors by performing mental tasks for them. Brain scans revealed that the woman, who has shown no outward signs of awareness since the accident in July last year, could understand people talking to her and was able to imagine playing tennis or walking around her home when asked to by doctors.
The discovery has astounded neuroscientists who believe it could have dramatic implications for life and death decisions over other patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Last year, an intense legal battle over the life of Terri Schiavo, a woman diagnosed as PVS, was brought to an end when US courts upheld the decision to remove her feeding tube in March. She died 13 days later in a Florida care home.Neuroscientists at the Medical Research Council's cognition and brain sciences unit at Cambridge and the University of Liege in Belgium used a brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect signs of awareness in the woman, the first time scientists have been able to do so in a PVS patient. The technique is now likely to become a standard way of determining how conscious vegetative patients are.
"This is extremely important. It's the difference between life and death. From cases in the UK and the US, we know that end-of-life decisions are of course extremely important and this will definitely change the way we deal with these patients. When you have signs of consciousness, you cannot decide to stop hydration and nutrition," said Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liege and co-author of the study which appears in the journal Science today.
The reported breakthrough was widely reported in the media world-wide. What surprised me about such coverage as I have been able to read, watch and hear is its failure to connect the latest developments with the extensive work already done on Persistent Vegetative State issues over many years, and its implications for patients who have been diagnosed as being in PVS. A world expert and author of break-through research on the subject is Professor Dr Keith Andrews, Director of the Institute of Complex Neurological Disability at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability in Putney, London (on whose governing body I was privileged to sit for some years). An early and still centrally important paper on PVS by Dr Andrews and his collaborators was "Misdiagnosis of the vegetative state: retrospective study in a rehabilitation unit" (Andrews K, Murphy L, Munday R, Littlewood C., British Medical Journal, 1996; 313: 13-16). Based on his studies of a sizeable sample of patients referred to the Royal Hospital after having been diagnosed by specialists elsewhere as being in PVS, Dr Andrews concluded (in the words of a later article) that –
Out of 40 patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, 17 (43%) were later found to be alert, aware, and often able to express a simple wish. The study is one of the largest, most sustained analyses of severely disabled people presumed to be incapable of conscious thinking, communication, or awareness of their surroundings. The author, London neurologist Dr. Keith Andrews, said, "It is disturbing to think that some patients who were aware had for several years been treated as being vegetative."
In a more recent document entitled "Misdiagnosis of Vegetative State" Helen Gill, MD, Fellow of Low Awareness States, Institute of Complex Disabilities, Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability, London, wrote:
It is evident from the discussion of the issues outlined above that there is considerable potential for misdiagnosis. This is a concept that is of great importance to the patient, the family and the Court. There have been several studies which have shown that misdiagnosis of the vegetative state is very common … For instance Tresch et al found that 18% of long term patients in nursing homes in the USA, diagnosed, as being in the Vegetative State were able to communicate. Nancy Childs et al in found that 37% of patients admitted to her rehabilitation unit with a diagnosis of the vegetative state were aware. Research at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability by Andrews et al found that 43% of patients admitted with a diagnosis of VS for longer than 6 months were misdiagnosed, including several patients who had been thought to be vegetative for several years. [References omitted]
The figure of 43 per cent of the Royal Hospital patients turning out to have been wrongly diagnosed as in PVS is very striking. These are the patients with whom Dr Andrews and his staff were able to establish the existence of a level of awareness and an ability to communicate, using new techniques developed over several years. It must almost certainly be the case that there were other patients in the group with whom it did not prove possible at that time to establish communication or show awareness, using the techniques then available, but who were in fact aware of their surroundings although unable to communicate that awareness. This is a chilling indication of the probable frequency with which patients who are in fact aware of their situation and able to understand conversations held around their beds are routinely condemned by specialists to years of agonising frustration as their families, doctors and nurses treat them as if they were unconscious vegetables.
Dr Andrews and the Royal Hospital have now developed an array of techniques for trying to establish both awareness in an apparently PVS patient and a capacity for two-way communication with the patient, often making use of specially developed computer and other technology. These procedures, christened Sensory Modality & Assessment Rehabilitation Technique (SMART), are discussed on the Royal Hospital's website here. For example, a patient apparently incapable of any movement may turn out to be able to exert sufficient pressure with his or her forehead, thumb, elbow or foot on a specially sensitive button connected to a computer to be able to answer 'yes' (one buzz) or 'no' (two buzzes) to questions, and later to be able to conduct quite complex conversations (one buzz for 'a', two for 'b', and so on, or answering 'yes' or 'no' as each letter of the alphabet is spoken or shown to the patient), sometimes using a programme that suggests how words and sentences might be completed with the patient able to choose between options offered (like some mobile phone text message programmes). Ability to exert even slight pressure somewhere can sometimes be established by using a feather to tickle different parts of the patient's body until a slight reaction is observed. All five senses are tested in similar ways. Many long and arduous sessions may be required before there is a breakthrough. Assessors have to be exhaustively trained. Special SMART kits have been produced. Eventual success can never be guaranteed, either because the assessors fail to find a way to identify awareness in the patient, or because there is no way in which the patient can communicate awareness, or because there really is no awareness at any level. Brain activity shown in a scan may now help to narrow down these differing possibilities.
A striking feature of successes in this field is that virtually all patients who have survived the ordeal of having been written off as vegetables for (sometimes) several years while unable to communicate their awareness, tell their families and doctors when communication is restored that despite their appalling disability, they are glad to be alive. I have not heard of any case of such a patient saying that he or she would have preferred to die rather than to survive with such severely limited quality of life. Some have described in intimate detail conversations they have listened to, in some cases years before, while lying there apparently unconscious or comatose. One such patient told his parents that the worst thing about the experience had been the boredom.
There is a comprehensive discussion of the subject, also on the Royal Hospital's website, here, including a reservation about the use of the term 'persistent' as applied to 'vegetative state':
The term Persistent Vegetative State was coined by Professors Jennett and Plum to describe a specific syndrome of reflex reactions without any meaningful response to the environment but in patients who have a sleep-awake pattern. Although the term ‘Persistent’ was used in the original paper most international working parties have accepted that the term is misleading since it is often misused to mean ‘permanent’ and that it confuses a prognosis with a diagnosis. For this reason the term ‘vegetative state’ on its own is preferred.
Against this background, it's legitimate to question whether that Guardian headline last week — "For first time, doctors communicate with patient in persistent vegetative state" — was an accurate or informative description of what happened with the Cambridge/Belgian patient. The results of the Cambridge/Belgian brain scans, indicating brain activity consistent with an understanding of questions or instructions put to the patient, seem more likely to suggest that the diagnosis of PVS was erroneous than that a patient in genuine PVS can understand, at some level, words spoken to him or her, although the difference may be to some extent semantic.
There are obvious implications of all this for situations where it is proposed to switch off life support systems for patients diagnosed as in PVS. A participant in a radio discussion of the Cambridge/Belgian story last week suggested that even if a brain scan suggested possible awareness at some level, the most merciful course might still be "to let the patient quietly slip away". Unfortunately in the present state of the law that is rarely an option: withdrawal of a life support system, the only legal way of bringing about a patient's death, actually means starving him or her to death, often a protracted and agonising way to die. It's not necesary to be a Roman Catholic or other religious Pro-Lifer to feel grave doubts about condemning to death, even in a more humane manner than is currently permitted, any human who may still be conscious, and with whom some possibility of communication might eventually be established.
The formidable task now will be to investigate how far, if at all, the brain scan technique used in the Cambridge/Belgian tests can be used, not only to establish that a degree of awareness exists, but more importantly how this can be translated into communication, at some level, between the patient and those around him or her. For this purpose Dr Andrews's work and that of the other determined researchers at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability should provide a flying start. What a pity that those in the media who reported the findings of the Cambridge/Belgian tests with such understandable excitement failed, for the most part, to put the story in the context of all the even more exciting, if also sobering, developments of the last ten years.
Update, 11 Sept 06: Professor Andrews has kindly told me that he and his team at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability Institute of Complex Disabilities were in fact participants in setting up and conducting the Cambridge/Belgian research study, and that when the report of the study was published last week he gave interviews about it to the BBC World Service and to BBC World (television), along with two other television interviews for other channels which didn't in the event use them because of their concentration on the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Show. This is welcome news, but doesn't, I think, affect my main point: that in reporting the Cambridge/Belgian study, the great majority of the British and international media failed to put it in the context of the highly relevant work already done by Professor Andrews and others, in consequence giving a seriously misleading impression of the real implications of the latest study's findings. This failure is even reproduced by today's Guardian editorial on the subject, "Consciousness and conscience". The Guardian's leader-writers really ought to have a look at Ephems before putting pen to paper, or finger-tips to keyboard. Even a few minutes with Google might save them from error.
Brian (who willingly confesses to having no medical or scientific expertise whatever)
